HAVING witnessed the Charles Street fiasco since it all started decades ago with the demolition of a row of houses, we now have an even more bizarre decision.

There are two fundamental issues.

The first is the valuation – a supposed £350,000 building is being bought for £905,000 plus another £25,000 in ‘fees’.

There is no guarantee that the site will be developed by Simons so the valuation is questionable (who did the valuation I wonder?) – so it might be another few decades before anything is done. Meanwhile the entire site has been financially blighted by moving the offices of West Dorset District Council to land which has a prime value for the council tax paying public. So, it is a financial farce at best, crass incompetence at worst.

The second point is to move the ‘community’ church to Poundbury, fine with me, no problem and welcome.

But However it is to be sited next to the new primary school and is supposedly for ‘community’ use. Until you read the small print that is.

It claims to be ‘community’, and in the church’s own internal context that is fine, but in the general public’s context it is flawed. One can hire the present church as a hall and one of the terms repeated word for word here is term number 6: No intoxicants shall be brought onto or consumed on the premises.

So we deduce that many organisations would choose not to use the hall, because they might like a glass of beer or wine. And why not?

The result is that people eagerly awaiting a new and much larger hall for events for people all across Poundbury and Dorchester won’t have such a facility for years to come – an open and genuine facility which is unfettered by specific restrictions to use. This larger facility was in the plan for Poundbury some 10 years ago, after a great deal of work.

It is another agreement flushed down the drain by councillors and planners. It is obvious that the decision makers follow a path of convenience rather than a path for the whole council tax paying community.

Incidentally there is already an extremely well appointed hall at the Top ‘o’ Town with the same restriction, so anyone wanting an excellent facility with that limit then I unhesitatingly recommend that hall.

Siting it next to the school suggests that it will perhaps influence the school with some of the other restrictions being subliminally applied to the pupils, and which I will not mention here.

Give the church a site on Poundbury as a stand-alone and it will be fine and well received. But Poundbury and Dorchester need a hall for meetings, events and so on. The Brownsword Hall only takes 80 people – and was built when the Poundbury population was in the few hundred.

With the population now well over 2,000 and growing rapidly towards the anticipated 5,000 as planned in the 1980s now is the time to build it.

Peter JW Noble

(Dorchester resident for over 45 years – and a practising Christian)